Religious services generally, he says in 1515-16 to the young monks, with a boldness which he takes little pains to conceal, “are in fact to-day more a hindrance than a help” to true piety. Speaking of the manner of their performance he says with manifest exaggeration, that it is such as to be no longer prayer. “We only insult God more when we recite them.... We acquire a false security of conscience as though we had really prayed, and that is a terrible danger!”[720] Then he goes on to explain “Almost all follow their calling at the present day with distaste and without love, and those who are zealous place their trust in it and merely crucify their conscience.” He speaks of the “superstitious exercises of piety” which are performed from gross ignorance, and sets up as the ideal, that each one should be at liberty to decide what he will undertake in the way of priestly or monastic observances, among which he enumerates expressly “celibacy, the tonsure, the habit and the recitation of the Breviary.”[721] We see from this that he was not much attached even to the actual obligations of his profession, and we may fairly surmise that such a disposition had not come upon him suddenly; these were rather the moral accompaniments of the change in his theological views and really date from an earlier period. We can also recognise in them the practical results of his strong opposition to the Observantines of the Order, which grew into an antagonism to all zeal in the religious life and in the service of God, and even to the observance of the duties, great or small, of one’s state of life. With his mystical idealism he demands, on the other hand, what is contrary to reason and impossible of attainment. Prayer, according to him, if rightly performed, is the “most strenuous work and calls for the greatest energy”; “the spirit must be raised to God by the employment of constant violence”; this must be done “with fear and trembling,” because the biblical precept says: “work out your salvation with fear and trembling”; in short, it is, he declares, “the most difficult and most tedious affair” (“_difficillima et tædiosissima_”).[722] Only then is it not so “when the Spirit of God takes us beneath His wings and carries us, or when misfortune forces us to pray from our hearts.” He can describe graphically the lukewarmness and distractions which accompany the recitation of the Divine Office, and can do so from experience if we may trust what he says in 1535 of himself: “I have in my day spent much time in the recitation of the canonical Hours, and often the Psalm or Hour was ended before I knew whether I was at the beginning or in the middle of it.”[723]